Church Scandal Revisited: the elevation of client autonomy

The posts by Greg and Mark reminded me of a conversation I had several months ago with a friend who worked at one of the firms representing the Church in these lawsuits. I had given my friend an article I wrote calling for Catholic lawyers to do more to integrate the principles of Catholic social thought with their practice of law. (Catholic Social Thought and the Ethical Formation of Lawyers, posted in the sidebar) His response was, "Why should a Catholic lawyer feel obliged to pursue such integration when the Church itself doesn't even expect its own lawyers to do so?" Certainly the bishops' handling of the litigation sends a powerful message to the wider profession.

To the extent that the lawyers themselves are culpable for not helping the bishops bring the legal strategy into line with the Church's mission, this failure likely stems not from the fact that lawyers are concerned only with profit (though many are), nor from lawyers' tendency to avoid difficult client conversations (though many do), but from the legal profession's elevation of client autonomy as an absolute value. Lawyers who conceive of themselves as "amoral technicians" believe that they are nobly filling their societal role by providing their clients with unfettered access to the maximum set of rights and privileges that our legal system has to offer. To second-guess a client's stated objectives -- or even to suggest that a client reflect meaningfully on those objectives -- is widely perceived as threatening the fundamental client-directed quality of legal representation. As Tom Shaffer puts it, "In moral discourse, as in political and legal discourse, we don't talk about good people, we talk about rights," and we assume "that what citizens want for one another, and lawyers for their clients, is not goodness but isolation and independence." I do not know this for a fact, but I would guess that lawyers did not play a meaningful part in any conversations regarding the consistency between the bishops' tactics and the Church's mission, to the extent such conversations occurred at all. Further, I would guess that the lawyers involved would defend this omission as a prudent limitation on the lawyer's gatekeeping role.

Rob